It is common for retail establishments, particularly restaurants, to facilitate drive-up customers with drive-up lanes and windows to service the customer. A customer will typically drive up to a menu/order board and communicate the customer's wishes from the vehicle to staff, including an order taker, inside the retail establishment. The customer, still in the vehicle, will then proceed to one or more windows in order to pay for the purchase, if required, and pick up the merchandise.
An intercom system typically facilitates communication between the occupant of the vehicle and the staff inside the establishment. In a “fast food” restaurant situation, a post mounted speaker and microphone, located near a menu board, is hard wired to an intercom base station located inside the restaurant. The base station wirelessly communicates with a portable device worn by an order taker. The portable device is typically a transceiver worn as a belt pack and an accompanied wired headset. Alternatively, in some instances, the portable device is self-contained on a wearable headset eliminating the need for a belt pack but resulting in a relatively bulky and unsightly headset. The order taker typically listens continually to the post mounted microphone and presses a button in order to speak to the vehicle occupant as needed.
Often it is desirable to have other restaurant employees listen to the conversation between the order taker and the vehicle occupant. For example, a cook can listen as the order is actually given to the order taker and can start preparation for the order even before the order is officially entered into the restaurant's order system by the order taker. In a typical fast food restaurant, employees beyond the order taker, such as a cook, can listen to the vehicle occupant but such additional employees must wear the same belt pack that the order taker typically wears. The combination belt pack and head set, or the self-contained headset, are not only expensive but are also bulky and obtrusive. This effectively limits how many restaurant employees can wear the device and what activities they can do while wearing the device. Further, the belt pack and headset combination typically suffers from reliability problems due to frequent damage to the connecting wire between the belt pack and headset.
Also it may be desirable for a fast food restaurant to have more than one employee available who can take orders. A belt pack and headset combination could be switched from one employee to another. However, such switching is cumbersome and results in some downtime during switch over limiting the effectiveness of this option. Multiple employees could each wear a separate belt pack and headset combination and each could be ready to take orders. Only the actual order taker would actually press a button activating the speak portion of the transceiver on their belt pack. Again, this option is expensive and the obtrusiveness of the belt pack and headset combination limits the activities of the employee who is not taking orders.